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Playing with the family the third: Teaching mom to play

Andreas Propst
Austria
enzenkirchen
upper austria
designer
Avatar
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OK so today my mother and I finally found some time to have a go at BDB.
Mom has like zero gaming experience, save for some classic and traditional Austrian boardgames (Pachisi, Snakes and Latter, Fox and Hens etc.), one or two games of Dominion (german version) a few years ago, which she cannot remember at all anymore...



Despite that, mom was very eager to play and went about it with a lot of enthusiasm and interest, though there were some major hurdles to overcome for her.

For once my mother speaks no English at all, even less than my sister Nora, and unlike her, mom has a terrible memory, especially when she is faced with a whole flood of information like card stats, card costs, card effects etc (all in English nonetheless).

Furthermore, the small font was a major problem for her, as her sight is already a bit bad and even with glasses she had troubles reading what the cards do. Combine that with no knowledge of English at all and you got a pretty rough condition for mom to learn and play as well as for me to teach.

Also, as mentioned above, my mother has a terrible memory, compared to my sister who had memorized all the cards after one game, and had a very hard time to remember the turn sequence, the meaning of the keywords (like "Draw", "Attach", "Combat", "Buy" etc). We will probably write up a small aid with the most common keywords and what they mean in German to solve that problem.

Despite all these "stumbling blocks", mom did not just cave in and give up, but did her best to get a hang of the game. At first we played with open hands and I basically told her what to do, what to buy and so forth. But as the game went on, she was able to more and more make her own decisions and actually started to like the game.

Amusingly, I lost (not intentional if you were assuming that ) our first game, because I missed to buy a Dino when I should have done so with all the explaining and stuff. So, with the help of the healing "Repair" Strategy card and many a Megalomania, mom was able to score her second KO while I was left with nothing else to do as to concede as there were no more Dinos left to buy in the Dino Offering.

Well at the end of the day mom's final opinion on the game was this:

"While I still need to play more games and still have to learn a lot to play more fluently and without your (my) help, I definitely want to play again. Towards the end I felt I had actually remembered quite a lot of how the game works, I enjoyed it as much as I could and even got a hint of gaming fever so to say. I will have to play some more soon..."


"Mission accomplished" I would say
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